Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/buchenwald/press/reuters.040395b

Archive/File: holocaust/germany/buchenwald reuter.040395b
Last-Modified: 1995/04/10
Hitler's forgotten victims to be remembered at Buchenwald
By Richard Murphy
BUCHENWALD, Germany, April 3 (Reuter) - Half a million
gypsies murdered by Nazi Germany, long neglected by history,
will receive belated recognition this month when a memorial in
their honour is unveiled at the former Buchenwald death camp.
The bleak hillside camp on the outskirts of Weimar also
hopes to lay to rest other lingering historical controversies
when it commemorates the 50th anniversary of its liberation at
ceremonies on April 8 and 9.
A new museum will pay tribute to all the estimated 51,000
people who died in Buchenwald, not just the communists singled
out for glorification by the regime that ruled former East
Germany until 1989.
It will also acknowledge another fact hushed up under
communism -- that for five years after World War Two, Buchenwald
remained in use as an internment camp run by Soviet occupation
forces. Around 10,000 inmates, mostly Germans, died.
For Germany's small gypsy community, which likes to be known
as the Sinti and Romany people, the erection of a new monument
near one commemorating the 11,000 Jewish victims of Buchenwald
is the culmination of a long struggle for recognition.
``For more than four decades, the holocaust on the Sinti and
Romany people was excluded from historical recollection, in west
Germany as well as in former east Germany,'' says Edgar
Bamberger of the Sinti and Romany Documentation Centre in
Heidelberg.
``It is therefore all the more important that, on the 50th
anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, for the first time
in Germany, a monument is being erected on the site of a former
concentration camp to recall the suffering of the Sinti and
Romany people under national socialism.''
Like Jews, gypsies were branded racially inferior by the
Nazis and earmarked for mass extermination.
Prisoners at Buchenwald, which was built in 1937, were
worked to death as slave labourers in the camp quarry or at
outlying arms factories.
There were no gas chambers but thousands were shot, hanged
or tortured to death by the camp's SS guards.
Within the perverse hierarchical system operated by the
Nazis, gypsies belonged with Jews right at the bottom of the
racial scale.
``We were at the bottom of the heap,'' says gypsy Franz
Rosenbach. ``You were not recognised as a person, you were a
number.''
Several hundred survivors from dozens of countries are
expected to attend the commemoration ceremonies.
``There are not much more than 100 survivors left in
Germany,'' says Reinhold Lochmann, a German communist.
He and other survivors are keen to ensure that the successes
of a Buchenwald resistance committee in saving the lives of
prisoners and ultimately in liberating the camp should not go
unrecognised.
Some conservative west German historians have challenged
assertions that political prisoners, many of them communists,
organised effective resistance to the brutal SS camp regime.
But Florial Barrier, a retired French printer who now lives
in Tours, says he was a member of a clandestine international
prisoners' committee which secretly stockpiled weapons and tried
to save individuals from death.
``International solidarity did exist,'' he says. ``The
organisation made sabotage possible, it took care of the sick,
provided food and ultimately secured the liberation of the
camp.''
U.S. military archives support the prisoners' claim that
they seized control of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, taking
around 125 SS men prisoner.
U.S. soldiers who arrived on April 13 reported finding the
camp in the hands of a well organised committee of prisoners.
``I took part in the liberation of Buchenwald,'' Barrier
says. ``This armed operation had been in preparation for years,
at first thanks to the German prisoners, later with the
participation of all other nationalities.''
Robert Buechler, a Czech Jew imprisoned as a child in
Buchenwald, recalls political prisoners sharing the food parcels
which only they were allowed to receive with other inmates and
believes they saved many lives, especially towards the end.
``I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that these political
prisoners, the illegal movement here, contributed to the saving
of around 600 children,'' he says.
For all survivors, returning to Buchenwald reopens bitter
wounds which the passage of 50 years has done little to heal.
Reinhold Lochmann's voice dwindles to a whisper as he
describes scenes of unimaginable brutality which took place
virtually daily on the camp parade ground.
One of his worst memories is of a prisoner being forced into
a small wooden box, which was nailed shut. The screaming
prisoner was then abandoned on the parade ground to starve to
death.
``After two or three days, it was over,'' Lochmann recalls.
But he is cheered when he remembers how some prisoners,
rising above their barbaric conditions, were capable of acts of
often life-saving kindness and generosity to their fellow men.
``Solidarity was vital for survival,'' he says. ``If I had
not found good friends and comrades in Buchenwald, I would have
been driven to despair within the first few days.''
Robert Buechler, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz,
finds one bleak consolation as he surveys the desolate remains
of Buchenwald.
``For me there is some satisfaction -- they wanted to kill
us, but I am still here.''

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